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Comment by vidanay | Hacker News Reader

Computer vision has been deeply integrated in manufacturing for 20+ years. if you've brushed your teeth or drank a sports drink in the last 10 years, your toothbrush or bottle has probably gone through a vision system that I write the software for.

(Not Cognex)

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Agreed, I worked on manufacturing quality assurance software that controlled vision to detect particles in vials of medicine 20 years ago. The main thing that has changed is the quality of the camera has greatly increased and the price of the camera has greatly decreased.

Yeah, when I started, we were using RS-170 cameras connected to $30k Cognex acquisition boards (all analog). The switch over to USB and then GigE has been fantastic.

I miss it in a way. USB cameras were just coming online and we're very good yet when I switched to a different industry. It looks like the company was acquired into an automation machinery parent company.

God, the first generations of both USB and Ethernet cameras positively SUCKED. Flaky, buggy, and expensive. Our first foray into Ethernet cameras was from a company called Opteon. They had taken a stock Intel ethernet card and flashed custom firmware onto it to support their custom framing. If the cards and the cameras didn't match exact versions, you could end up bricking one or both of them. They had to be sent back to the vendor to be fixed.

edit: Oh, hey! Opteon still exists! I'm sure their products are much better than those first generations.

https://www.opteontech.com/products/cameras

oops, meant to say "were NOT very good yet when I switched to a different industry". Apparently I failed at typing and paying attention to a meeting at the same time. :)

Same here, RS-170 into Cognex MVS8100 ca. 20 years ago. Their pattern matching was gold standard at the time. We also used Matrox but I was a Cognex man at that time. Some of those systems are still running today but I do not miss the days of analog video one bit.

Aye. Back at university, 19-18 years ago now, I had a "mandatory"[0] year in "industry"[1], and some of the job advertisements were for adding computer vision to some process or other. Given how… out of date the teacher introductory module in the final year course was, there was no way this was students being asked to actually create those vision systems.

[0] scare quotes because I had the completely free choice between two otherwise identical degrees, one of which had a mandatory year in industry and the other did not, because the UK council tax system demands a different rate if you're a student on a course with a mandatory year in industry

[1] also a cheat, I worked for an academic research lab

Gotta be Keyence?

My favorite machine vision use case is the tomato sorter. This is one I found from YouTube, not affiliated

https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk

No. my company makes entire PC based vision systems including material handling and value added services. We are not a component level vendor.

Makes sense.

I think it's funny that by you providing a major employer where you don't work nerd sniped a couple of us into guessing the other players in the space.

Ah, a Tomra machine. They too produce the machines which collect returnable bottles. Those are installed in each Supermärkte in Germany, for example.

And here's documentation on machines which sort grapes intended for wine production:

https://www.food.fraunhofer.de/en/beispiele12/Produktschutz/...

I’m going to grad school for computer vision… how do I do this in manufacturing for money when I’m done with school?

My best advice if you want to break into manufacturing is to pair Machine Learning / Computer Vision skills with an Engineering degree (Chemical, Mechanical or similar).

I work in heavy industry (Steel Mill) most people that get hired around here have Engineering degrees. Mining, Oil and Gas is quite similar.

We do engage with data science people etc (Usually as consultants) but there can be a lot of friction as oftentimes the conversation gets lost in translation. If you can fluently speak 'engineer' and 'data scientist' you would make yourself a very attractive hire.

I was a pilot in my old life, so I can speak engineer as a side effect lol

Lots of materials science interest in this area. Applications are pretty diverse, but there are definitely opportunities at the microscope OEMs, as well as in manufacturing - steel and metals processing like sibling mentioned, also aerospace (I know some aerospace R&D folks that are doing a bunch of semantic segmentation for microstructure analysis - for like engine disk material design and that sort of thing) and other sectors. You might look into the additive manufacturing OEMs if that catches your interest, process monitoring (video and acoustic) is a big deal there

You could also look into the lab automation sector, that is taking off in a big way recently for materials and chemistry (round 2 for chemistry i guess). Chemspeed is the big name but there’s a bunch of smaller companies doing cool vision and robotics stuff in this area

Tons of jobs in varied sectors, my employer has a few people working on this in various aspects.

What should I learn then along the way? I cannot seem to get anyone to email me or call me before, that’s actually why I went to grad school lol.

Learn to get into machine vision? Start doing projects in the area and also learn about the mechanical, controls and electrical components of the equipment.

How much does th industry use the fancy vision algorithms ? Or are the algorithms based on classic computer vision ?

Congrats for building stuff that lasts. Would you be able to share what it does, even if in generic and high level terms?

Just about anything you can think of, we've provided inspection equipment for it...

Toothbrushes, drink bottles, oil bottles, more labels than you can imagine, pharmaceuticals, credit cards, fast food packaging, retail packaging, wine bottles, liquor bottles, beer cans, injection molded plastics, IBM bottles, insert molded bottles, cosmetics, raw foods, countless barcodes, and many, many more.

Hijacking to post another example. I know from a previous work experience that automated dye-penetrant inspection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_penetrant_inspecti...), using CV for the automatic detection of indications, has been used in aerospace for at the very least 15 years (and quite likely much more).

FANUC?

Nope.

Systek (sp?)

No, but they are our most similar competitor.

Yeah we use them to do a bunch of checks on our lines, building out a warehouse will be ready in 2024 so using their latest computer vision tech integrated with all equipment controlled via SCADA

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